Many industries either produce or require large quantities of water and other liquids. This is particularly true of unconventional oil and natural gas operations that use hydraulic fracturing in combination with horizontal drilling to extract oil and natural gas. The process of hydraulic fracturing requires millions of gallons of water that are mixed with sand and other lubricating agents and injected into hydrocarbon formations under controlled high pressure to break open the rock, expand and hold open the fractures, thereby allowing oil and natural gas to flow to the well head. Following hydraulic fracturing, some of the fluids that are injected along with fluids that are naturally resident in the formation are returned to the surface. These fluids need to be managed in a responsible and cost-effective manner. Storing and disposing of these fluids in an environmentally safe manner present significant challenges. Many commercial operations use tanker trucks, rail cars or pipelines to haul waste fluids away for disposal. This greatly increases costs if the amount of waste liquid is large and the disposal facility is remote. Transporting fluids also created hazards and increases road or rail traffic.
To support industrial processes that require or produce large quantities of water or other liquids, many operators build temporary modular above-ground (MAG) fluid storage tanks to hold wastewater or other fluids. Such tanks may be deployed in, for example, an oilfield. Oilfield operators and similar industries that use MAG tanks constantly seek to improve logistics, increase safety, increase flexibility, lower costs, and expedite the set-up and take-down times of the MAG tanks.